Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands

The small volcanic Banda Islands, in the east of today's Indonesia, were once the world's only source of nutmeg and mace. Between 1609 and 1621 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) fought to force the islanders to sell their spices to it alone, and when they refused, it conquered the archipelago by force. The campaign, led in its final stage by Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, left the islands almost emptied of their original inhabitants, and some writers refer to it as the Banda genocide.

A Dutch fleet first reached Banda in 1599, signed contracts with local chiefs and set up a trading post. The VOC, founded in 1602 with the right to make treaties, wage war and build forts in Asia, wanted exclusive control of the spice trade. The Bandanese, led by village elders and notables known as orang kaya, preferred to sell to whoever paid most, including English, Malay, Javanese and Makassarese traders.

In April 1609 a fleet under Pieter Verhoeff arrived at Banda Neira intending to build a fort. Talks went badly, and in late May local leaders lured Verhoeff and two other commanders into an ambush and killed them, along with their escort, 46 Dutchmen in all. The Dutch retaliated by plundering villages, imposed a treaty recognising their monopoly, and built Fort Nassau. The Bandanese continued to trade with others. By 1614 the company's directors had concluded that the whole archipelago must be conquered, even if it meant destroying the native population. An attack on Ai in 1615 was beaten back with English help, but Jan Dirkszoon Lam captured the island in April 1616; resisters were killed, and about 400 people, many of them women and children, drowned trying to reach English-held Run. The English held out on Run for over four years before abandoning it, after which the Dutch killed or enslaved its adult men, exiled the women and children and cut down its nutmeg trees.

Coen, a hard-line advocate of monopoly who resented a 1619 agreement giving the English a third of the spice trade, wrote in October 1620 that Banda had to be subdued again and resettled with other people. Early in 1621 he arrived with 19 ships, about 1,655 Dutch soldiers and 286 Japanese mercenaries. On 11 March his troops stormed the main island of Lontor, and by the next day they held it. The orang kaya sued for peace and accepted Dutch sovereignty, a fixed-price monopoly and Dutch forts in return for personal freedom and the right to practise Islam.

The peace did not hold. Many islanders fled to the hills and fought on, and Coen burned villages. In April confessions to a supposed conspiracy were extracted from orang kaya under torture. At least 789 of them and their families were deported to Batavia, where many were enslaved, and on 8 May 24 orang kaya were beheaded by Japanese mercenaries. Months of fighting followed, and many Bandanese died of hunger or threw themselves from cliffs rather than surrender.

Figures differ. Coen himself reported that about 2,500 people died of hunger, misery or the sword and that no more than 300 escaped. The historian Hans Straver estimated Lontor's population at 4,500 to 5,000, of whom about 1,700 were enslaved and 2,500 died of famine and disease. For the islands as a whole, Vincent Loth and Charles Corn estimated a population of around 15,000 before the conquest, of whom only about 1,000 survived on the islands; Peter Lape put the share killed, enslaved or deported at 90 per cent. Several hundred people escaped to the Kei Islands and Seram.

The Dutch repopulated the islands with enslaved workers from the Dutch East Indies, India and China, labouring on nutmeg estates under Dutch planters called perkeniers. Conditions were harsh: by 1681 only about 100 native Bandanese remained, and some 200 slaves a year were imported to keep the workforce at 4,000. England formally gave up its claims in the Treaty of Breda in 1667.

Our 1600 and 1650 maps cover the years before and after the conquest, when the Dutch Republic was displacing the Portuguese Empire as the leading European power in the spice trade.